"The Book of the New Sun - The Claw of the Conciliator"

[fiefoe]

The second book moves very quickly, and the pit yawns ever deeper.

• "You will see at least two persons executed here in the formal style.. One's a woman, so we'll be using the chair! That's something a lot of people who boast of their sophistication and the cosmopolitan tincture of their educations have never seen."
• Then very suddenly, I who had been blind before understood why it was that Abaia had sent me this dream, and had sought to enlist me in the great and final war of Urth.
• we who rode his back might have been pygmies from some children's tale bound for the anthill stronghold of a pixie monarch.
• I saw how little it weighted on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thought sI forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself or not.
• Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life... One who truly benefits another is for a moment at a level with the Pancreator, and it gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days;
• Jonas said, "That's something that's always welcome, like the misfortunes of an older brother."
• One of the fluttering creatures swooped, looking for all Urth like a hole torn in the universe, for it was true fuligin, as lightless as my own habit. / firefly tigermen
• One golden afternoon, when the wind played the innocent games of childhood with the fresh-fledged sycamores...
• SECOND DEMON: This world that you and we treasure has now been driven round the sun so often that the warp and woof of its space grow threadbare and fall as dust and feeble lint from the loom of time.
• Someone.. possessed that rarest of all weapons, a dream. It moved like tyrian smoke, but very much faster, and in an instant it had enveloped the giant.
• the eastern clouds, dyed cerise and flame by the eternal mysterious hope of dawn
• In the final reckoning there is only love, only that divinity. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
• An age is the interval between the exhaustion of some mineral or other resource in its naturally occurring form (for example, sulfur) and the next.